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reader. There was nothing to keep him in the village with its new inhabitants, and it held too

many painful memories for him. He offered to help Elinor build up her library again, and she

accepted. Meggie suspected she was secretly toying with the idea of getting Darius to read aloud

again, now that Capricorn's malevolent presence no longer left him tongue-tied.

Meggie looked back for a long time as they left Capricorn's village behind them. She knew she

would never forget the sight of it, just as you never forget many stories even though — or

perhaps because — they have scared you.

Before they left, Mo had asked her, with concern in his voice, whether she minded if they drove

to Elinor's first. Meggie did not mind at all. Oddly enough, she felt more homesick for Elinor's

house than for the old farmhouse where she and Mo had lived for the last few years.

The scar left by the bonfire was still visible on the lawn behind the house, where Capricorn's

men had piled up the books and burned them. But before Elinor had had the ashes taken away,

she had filled a jam jar with the fine gray dust, and it stood on the bedside table in her room.

Many of the books that Capricorn's men had only swept off the shelves were already back in

their old places, others were waiting on Mo's workbench to be rebound, but the library shelves

were empty. As they stood looking at them, Meggie saw the tears in Elinor's eyes even though

she was quick to wipe them away.

Elinor did a great deal of buying over the next few weeks. She bought books. She traveled all

over Europe in search of them. Darius was always with her, and sometimes Mo went with them,

too. But Meggie stayed in the big house with her mother. They would sit together at a window

looking out at the garden where the fairies were building themselves nests, gently glowing

globes that hung among the branches of the trees. The glass men and women settled into

Elinor's attic, and the trolls dug caves among the big old trees that grew in abundance in Elinor's

garden. She told them all that they should never leave her property, warning them urgently of

the dangers of the world beyond the hedges that enclosed it, but soon the fairies were flying

down to the lake by night, the trolls were walking along its banks and stealing into the sleeping

villages, and the little glass people would disappear into the tall grass that covered the slopes of

the mountains around the lake.

"Don't worry too much," said Mo, whenever Elinor bewailed their stupidity. "After all, the world

they came from wasn't without its dangers."

"But it was different!" cried Elinor. "There were no cars — suppose the fairies fly into a

windshield? And there were no hunters with rifles shooting at anything that moves, just for the

fun of it."

By now Elinor knew everything about the world of Ink-heart. Meggie's mother had needed a

great deal of paper to write down her memories of it. Every evening Meggie asked her to tell

more stories, and then they sat together while Teresa wrote and Meggie read the words and

sometimes even tried to paint pictures of what her mother described.

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The days went by, and Elinor's shelves filled up with wonderful new books. Some of them were

in poor condition, and Darius, who had begun to draw up a catalog of Elinor's printed treasures,

kept interrupting his own work to watch Mo at his. He sat there wide-eyed as Mo freed a badly

worn book from its old cover, fixed loose pages back, glued the spines in place, and did whatever

else was necessary to preserve the books for many more years to come.

Long after all this, Meggie couldn't have said exactly when they had decided to stay on with

Elinor. Perhaps not for many weeks, or perhaps they had known from the first day they were

back. Meggie was given the room with the bed that was much too big for her, and which still had

her book box standing under it. She would have loved to read aloud to her mother from her own

favorite books, but of course she understood why Mo very seldom did so, even now. And one

night when she couldn't get to sleep, because she thought she saw Basta's face out in the dark,

she sat down at the desk in front of her window and began to write, while the fairies played in

Elinor's garden and the trolls rustled in the bushes. For Meggie had a plan: She wanted to learn

to make up stories like Fenoglio. She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read

aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her

with homesick eyes. So Meggie decided words would be her trade.

And where better could she learn that trade than in a house full of magical creatures, where

fairies built their nests in the garden and books whispered on the shelves by night? As Mo had

said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

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Sources & Acknowledgements

The Artist and Publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use copyrighted

materials:

pp. 350, 466 - Richard Adams: from Watership Down (Penguin Books, 1974), reprinted

by permission of David Highani Associates;

p. 394 - Hans Christian Andersen: from HansAndersen: His Classic Fairy Tales, translated by Erik

Haugaard (Gollancz, 1976);

pp. 282, 359, 469 - J. M. Barrie: from Peter Pan (Penguin Popular Classics, 1995), reprinted by

permission of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity;

p. 1-Lucy M.Boston: from The Children of Green Knawe (Puffin Books, 1975);

pp. 153, 343 - Ray Bradbury: from Fahrenheit 451 (Flamingo Modern Classics, 1993);

pp. 74, 377 - Roald Dahl: from The BFG Qonathan Cape, 1982) and The Witches

(Jonathan Cape, 1983), reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates;

p. 511 - Richard de Bury: from Philobiblon (Blackwell, 1970), reprinted by permission of the

publisher;

pp. 131, 203, 407 - Michael de Larrabeiti: from The Borrible Trilogy (Macmillan, 2002), reprinted

by permission of the publisher;

p. 79 - Solomon Eagle: quoted in A Gentle Madness by Nicholas Basbanes (Henry Holt &

Company, 1995);

pp. 400, 520 - Michael Ende:from Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (Penguin

Books, 1990) and The Neverending Story (Penguin Books, 1984);

pp. 90, 136, 266, 288, 353 - William Goldman: from The Princess Bride (Bloomsbury

Publishing, 1990);

pp. 21, 96 - Kenneth Grahame: from The Wind in the Willows (Puffin Books, 1994);

p. 316 - Eva Ibbotson: from The Secret of Platform 13 (Macmillan Children's Books,

2001);

pp. 187, 484 - Rudyard Kipling: from The Jungle Book (Puffin Classics, 1994), reprinted

by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of The National Trust for Places of Historical

Interest or Natural Beauty;

p. 382 -Edward William Lane (translator): from The Arabian Nights'Entertainments

(East-West Publications, 1982);

p. 123 - C. S. Lewis: from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Collins, 1987);

p. 368 - Otfried Preussler: from Satanic Mill (Peter Smith Publishers, 1985);

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p. 527 - Maurice Sendak: from Where the Wild Things Are (The Bodley Head, 1967);

pp. 236, 246-7 - Shel Silverstein: from Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems & Drawings

of Shel Silverstein (HarperCollins Publishers, 1974), (C) 1974 by Evil Eye Music, Inc.;

pp. 12, 108 - Isaac Bashevis Singer: from Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, & Other Stones

(Oxford University Press, 1977);

pp. 424, 443 - J. R. R. Tolkien: from The Hobbit (HarperCollins, 1994) and The Lord of the Rings

(HarperCollins, 1994), reprinted by permission of the publisher;

p. 417 - Evangeline Walton: from The Mabinogian Tetrakgy (Overlook Press, 2002);

pp. 307, 333 - T H. White: from The Sword in the Stone (Harper & Row, 1973) and The

Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King (University of

Texas Press, 1988).

***Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be

pleased to rectify any omissions brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.

291

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